Bohemia Interactive issued an interesting release today revealing how it has handled piracy over the years. The company claims that it uses a unique brand of copy protection that manifest itself as a form of gameplay / quality degradation. Naturally when a game starts messing up - even a pirated one - people start to complain about bugs. From the release:

"One of the aspects of developing any game in this modern age is how to protect it, it's widely known that as soon as any game is released there are those who are looking to download it for free, who for whatever reason feel that their right is to not pay for something despite all the thousands of hours that have gone into its development. Obviously game developers have a responsibility to themselves to try to protect their company's future, but also a responsibility to the community that supports them by buying their titles, no gamer who has spent their hard earned money to buy a game wants to be playing MP against others who didn't buy their game, no add-on maker wants to have things they created over countless hours downloaded and used by people who didn't buy the game it's intended for. That is why we try to come up with unique and irrefutable ways to stop people from playing our games without paying for them, that's why Take On Helicopters shipped with our unique anti-piracy countermeasures."

The release goes on to say that, dating back to 2001 with the original Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, the company has used non-traditional anti-piracy countermeasures. While these measures do not stop the initial "illegal downloader," they only get a small taste of the full experience "before many aspects of the game, including performance start to degrade."

Take On Helicopters, the company's latest title, is no exception, with some users having reported morphed/watery image degradation (details on that can be found here). While some might counter by saying that Bohemia is simply saying this to cover up some glitches and bugs in its latest game, the company claims that these problems are not happening in legal copies.

The company closes by saying that there are other ways to try out a title besides downloading an illegal copy:

"Counterfeit copies of our games may degrade and, moral aspects aside, we certainly recommend only playing the original version. We have a free public demo version of Take On Helicopters in the development pipeline for those that prefer to test it before buying."

Comments

This isn't really a new idea, it's just the first time that I've heard of someone implementing it. I have heard of a similar scheme but that was before buying games from online stores like Steam came about, so I don't know if it would work well now:

The physical medium that the game is on contains errors that the executable actually looks for and corrects. The only way to copy the disc is to set options in the burning/ripping software that ignore, fill in or make the errors consistent. Alternately, when developing a crack the crackers may find and "fix" the code. When the program is installed, the code errors are not corrected so that when the game is played it becomes unstable and/or unplayable. The person who pirates the game gets a taste of it, but if they complain then the developer is able to say, "Only pirated copies of those games have those errors." Conversely, if everyone that the pirate talks to says the game runs perfectly (which of course depends on the actual non-pirated code being bug-free as well) then if the pirate really wants to play the game, they might just go out and buy it to be free of the glitches.

Every time I hear about one of these new and innovative DRM solutions, I have to stop and ask, "How much more could this game company have improved the core game had they dedicated all that time and money they spent on DRM on the actual game?"

Bohemia Interactive is not really known for their business or technical sense... they do not need to worry about giving people a 'bad impression of their game' because players are not the ones they are trying to impress....

​Zippy, depending on how they implemented it you would need to know exactly where the errors are introduced to be able to patch them. If the errors are on the physical media, then only creating an exact copy of the original disk would allow for a pirated copy to work - but if the executable is "fixed" that might render the game unplayable. If an exact copy is not made, then the errors in the physical media will likely be corrected by the burning/ripping software and you're back to the game being glitchy.

So, you create a bad impression of your game by causing lots of online discussion about the many bugs it has, with nobody knowing that the bugs are supposedly intentional. Then, you create a bad impression of yourself by suggesting that anybody complaining about bugs is a thief, which will further aggrieve legitimate customers experiencing bugs.

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Sora-Chan: Con't. Games like AC are a pain to someone like me who likes to play games in order. So when a game gets too many releases too quickly, it puts me off. Only exceptions are games that have no interconnected underlying stories like the FF games.03/31/2015 - 2:53pm

Sora-Chan: Wikipedia has rarely let me down on matters like this. But yeah... AC needs a break.. like two.. or three... or eight years.03/31/2015 - 2:51pm

Conster: There's 9 already?! I think I played 1, 2, and the ones inbetween 2 and 3.03/31/2015 - 2:23pm

Sora-Chan: Con't There are now Nine... of just the main entries into the series. There are 13 more in the "other games" department.03/31/2015 - 2:15pm

Sora-Chan: I tried to get into AC. Was having a decent time with the first one, at which point they had already released three titles. Then a fourth came out... then a fifth... the wall kept growing before I could finish the first.03/31/2015 - 2:14pm

Daniel Lewis: I think ubisoft should give AC a break before it's milked to death,and i'm a big fan of the games03/31/2015 - 1:15pm

Daniel Lewis: The only thing said i disagree with is the final quote on Men's experiences are seen to be universal but women are gendered,though doesn't anita say that games with male protagonists are male power fantasies,so in turn both are gendered03/31/2015 - 1:08pm

Daniel Lewis: i found the video to be much better than any of the TvW series and it's about time the positive women are put in the spotlight03/31/2015 - 1:06pm

Daniel Lewis: So feministfrequency released a positive female character video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXmj2yJNUmQ03/31/2015 - 1:05pm

Daniel Lewis: I think the guy who made the direct leak said it was an april fools joke when a real one was announced03/31/2015 - 12:43pm

MaskedPixelante: No way Nintendo would let information like that get out. Remember, they shut down a memoir about the localization of Earthbound by enforcing a 20 year old NDA on the author.03/31/2015 - 12:42pm

james_fudge: Conster: the larger issue is that Ind. does not protect LGBTQ+ people under state law03/31/2015 - 12:11pm

PHX Corp: @MP I think it is confirmed(not an April Fools joke) http://mynintendonews.com/2015/03/31/nintendo-direct-confirmed-for-wednesday-april-1st/03/31/2015 - 12:00pm

Conster: Apparently Pence intends to amend SB101 so denying service isn't allowed - without explicitly protecting LGBT+ and while still allowing the many other things you can get away with now if it's motivated by your religious beliefs.03/31/2015 - 11:53am

MaskedPixelante: http://mynintendonews.com/2015/03/30/rumour-nintendo-direct-on-april-1st/ A supposed full leak of tomorrow's Nintendo Direct, so you can all laugh and laugh about how wrong it is.03/31/2015 - 11:35am

PHX Corp: http://kotaku.com/why-a-tekken-7-character-is-being-called-a-phoney-1694724959 Why a Tekken 7 Character Is Being Called a Phoney03/31/2015 - 10:08am

Michael Chandra: Argh. Anyway, I'm glad that move was made. Wonder if it counts, can he just declare it like that? 03/31/2015 - 9:27am

Zen: Conster - Good, it's a BS law that exists to just allow hate basically. Glad people are standing up to it. Sadly it should never have passed to begin with though.03/31/2015 - 8:39am